Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Institutionalized

    They stuck me in an institution
    Said it was the only solution
    To give me the needed professional help
    To protect me from the enemy — myself.

    — Suicidal Tendencies, Institutionalized

    I was a discussant on an excellent panel on authoritarian legislatures at APSA 2013. If this is the state of the art in the study of authoritarian legislatures, we are in a good state.

    One point that I’ve been mulling over since then is about who a regime’s “enemies” are. In three of the four papers, the focus is on citizens and movements outside of the regime itself. The regime needs to manage this (latent or actual) opposition, and at the same time, citizens and movements may try to use the regime’s own institutions to further their interests. In one of the four papers, though, the regime faces challenges from within its own ranks.

    When we distinguish who an authoritarian regime’s enemies can be, we can see a bit more clearly that the “powersharing” function of authoritarian institutions is about managing internal challenges (“stuck me in an institution…to protect me from the enemy — myself”). The “cooptation” function of authoritarian institutions is about managing external challenges by bringing them somehow into closer contact with the regime.

    One interesting direction for research would to be think about the strategic alliances between internal and external enemies and the conditions under which such alliances will emerge and succeed. In my own critique of recent work on authoritarian institutions, I used the example of Anwar Ibrahim: a former outsider who almost became the consummate insider (he was Deputy Prime Minister), but has since become the consummate outsider. His expulsion from UMNO was at least in part a strategic move on Mahathir Mohamad‘s part to forestall the possibility that Anwar would forge an alliance between some faction within UMNO and the country’s opposition. This “endogenous distinction between insiders and outsiders” seems ripe for exploration.

  • Still More on Microfoundations

    Once again, Daniel Little’s fascinating blog Understanding Society provides a gem on the relationship between microfoundations and explanation in the social sciences. All of this applies equally to many questions in political science (just replace “organization” with “state”).

    My defense of meso-level causation is based on four ideas. First, the practice of sociologists justifies this claim, since sociologists do in fact make use of meso-meso claims. They often do not attempt to provide vertical explanations from circumstances of the actor to meso- and macro-level outcomes; instead, they often provide horizontal explanations that explain one set of meso and macro outcomes on the basis of the causal powers of another set of meso and macro conditions or structures. Second, sociology is a “special science” analogous to cognitive science, dependent on a set of causally linked entities at a lower level. Arguments offered for the relative explanatory autonomy of the higher-level theories are applicable to sociology as well. The basis for rejecting reductionism is well established here. Third, meso entities (organizations, institutions, normative systems) often have stable characteristics with regular behavioral consequences. This is illustrated with the example of organizations. Fourth, those entities must have microfoundations; we must be confident that there are individual behaviors at lower levels that support these macro characteristics. But it is legitimate to draw out the macro-level effects of the macro-circumstance under investigation, without tracing out the way that effect works in detail on the swarms of actors encompassed by the case. The requirement of microfoundations is not a requirement on explanation; it does not require that our explanations proceed through the microfoundational level. It is an ontological principle but not a methodological principle. Rather, it is a condition that must be satisfied on prima facie grounds, prior to offering the explanation. (I refer to this as the “weak” requirement of microfoundations; link.) In short, we are not obliged to trace out the struts of Coleman’s boat in order to provide a satisfactory macro- or meso-level explanation or mechanism.

    See my previous posts on microfoundations here and here and here for more.